Position or Perish: The Narrative Blueprint
The frame wins. Carry the frame.
Note: this post first appears on Westenberg.
Avis was losing $3.2 million a year; and they’d been unprofitable for thirteen straight.
In 1962, they sat at number two in American car rental, well behind Hertz, with no plausible path to catching up. Robert Townsend, the new president, hired Doyle Dane Bernbach and asked them to do something useful with the worst hand in the industry.
The campaign DDB produced ran a single line:
“Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars. So we try harder.”
Within a year, Avis had moved from $3.2 million in losses to $1.2 million in profit. The cars hadn’t changed. The locations hadn’t changed. The pricing hadn’t changed; but the story they told about themselves had, and they let that story do the work.
What positioning is
Positioning is the answer to a question every customer asks before they decide whether to care about your product: “What is this, and why should it matter to me right now?”
Before you have a product, and well before you have an investor, you need to have an answer to that question - and you need it in a single // simple sentence. Nobody is going to do the cognitive work for you; they’ll categorise your product based on whatever signal they catch in the first three seconds, and the category, once set, is near-impossible to dislodge.
The category - the box they put you in - determines who you compete with, what price they expect to pay, what features they expect you to have, and what story you’re allowed to tell. Get the category right and you set the terms; get it wrong and you spend the rest of your life arguing with the market about who and what you are.
Al Ries and Jack Trout published Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind in 1981. The book makes a forty-year-old argument that the war is fought in the customer’s head, where there’s no spare room and no patience for new claims.
The most expensive mistake founders make
The vast majority of founding teams treat positioning as a marketing exercise: Something the marketing team does after the product is built; something you put on the homepage when you’re ready to launch.
This is both wrong - and expensive.
Positioning is upstream of marketing. It’s upstream of product, pricing, hiring, fundraising, and PR. It determines what you build, who you sell to, what you charge, and what investors think you are. A company with clear positioning ships faster and raises at higher multiples because every decision flows from the same understood centre.
A company without clear positioning ships features that contradict each other and hires people who can’t agree on what the company does.
I’ve worked with companies that had product-market fit and were still failing because no two people inside the building could finish the sentence: “We are the _____ for _____.” When the founders can’t agree, the sales team improvises, and the marketing team writes copy that doesn’t ladder up to anything coherent.
The messaging spine
Every positioning piece should open with a messaging spine. It’s the series of claims and narrative touchpoints that hold up an entire company. Decks, websites, sales scripts, hiring materials etc all come later.
A spine has four parts.
The first is the category. What kind of thing are you? What bucket do you belong in? A category is a shortcut, telling the customer how to think about you in a half-second of attention. If your category is wrong or fuzzy, every downstream message leaks energy trying to fix it.
The second is the audience. Who is this for, in specifics? “Businesses,” “developers,” and “creators” are broad nouns that fall apart under any pressure. A real audience description names a role and a moment. “Heads of compliance at mid-market fintechs trying to pass their first SOC 2” is an audience. “Modern professionals” is a hallucination.
The third is the alternative. What are they doing today instead of using you? This is the question most founders skip, and it’s the one that matters most. Customers don’t compare you to nothing. They compare you to the spreadsheet they’ve used for eight years, to the agency they hired last quarter, to the open-source tool they already know, or to the colleague who handled it last month. Until you name the alternative, you can’t claim the wedge.
The fourth is the wedge. What’s the single sharp thing you do better than the alternative? One thing, expressed so cleanly that a customer can repeat it back to a colleague without stumbling.
When the spine is right, every other piece of copy in the company writes itself.
Narrative is positioning told over time
Positioning is the static claim, but narrative is the moving picture.
A company can hold a single positioning statement for years, and most should; but the narrative around that statement has to evolve, because the world evolves and your competition evolves with it.
Stripe’s positioning has been close to constant since 2010: payment infrastructure for the internet. The narrative around it has cycled through a dozen variations; in the early years they talked to developers about seven lines of code. By 2015 they were talking to CFOs about reducing fraud and reconciliation overhead. By 2020 they were telling Fortune 500 boards that they were the operating system for global commerce. But the spine held steady across each story.
Most companies get this backwards; they keep the narrative fixed and let the positioning drift. The pitch deck still says what it said three years ago, while the product has wandered into a new category and the leadership team is pretending it hasn’t.
The remedy is to write the spine down, share it with everyone who joins the company, and revisit it once a year with the discipline of a financial audit.
Position against something specific
Every position works through contrast. The claim says you’re better than something, simpler than something, more honest than something, or designed for someone the alternative ignores.
When Salesforce launched in 2000, they positioned themselves against “software” itself. “No software.” Every piece of collateral pointed at the same enemy: installed enterprise software that took twelve months to deploy and cost millions in services. Customers didn’t have to understand SaaS as a category. They had to understand they were tired of waiting for IT to install Siebel.
Pick your enemy with care. It should be big enough to matter, recognisable enough that customers already have an opinion about it, beatable enough that your wedge works against it, and unable to follow you into the corner you’re claiming.
The wrong enemy is another startup nobody’s heard of. The wrong enemy is the abstract status quo of “manual processes,” because nobody buys against an abstraction. The right enemy has either a name and a market cap, or a behavioural pattern your audience can picture without effort.
The category gambit
Sometimes the right move is to claim an existing category.
Sometimes the right move is to invent a new one.
Inventing a category is harder and more expensive than founders think. The standard venture advice is to “create a new category and dominate it,” and most who try this fail because they don’t have the budget, the airtime, the patience, or the distribution to teach the market a new word.
When category creation works, it’s because someone with serious distribution put their full weight behind a single term until the market repeated it back. HubSpot did this with inbound marketing. Drift did it with conversational marketing. Gong did it with revenue intelligence. Datadog did it with observability. Each company spent years publishing books and running conferences under a single banner until journalists and analysts stopped questioning whether the category was real.
If you’re a seed-stage company with $2 million in the bank, you can’t afford to create a category; but you can afford to claim a corner of an existing one, and own it harder than anyone else does. This is the Avis play: you don’t need to invent the rental car. You need to be the company that tries harder than Hertz.
The category gambit gets misread because the visible examples are the winners. The failed attempts at category creation don’t get studied. For every Drift, there are twenty companies that tried to coin a term, ran out of money before the market adopted it, pivoted into someone else’s category, and disappeared from view.
What investors actually buy
Founders raising venture money tend to treat the pitch deck as a product spec. The deck explains what the product does, how the technology works, why the team is qualified to build it, and how the market is large enough to matter.
This is also wrong.
Investors fund stories about products. The deck is a narrative artefact, and its job is to make a partner at a fund repeat your story in a Monday morning meeting without garbling it. If the story collapses when an underprepared partner retells it on three hours of sleep, the deck has failed at the only thing decks exist for.
The best decks I’ve worked on open with a claim about the world. The product comes in around slide six, after the world has been described in a way that makes the product feel inevitable. Something has changed, something is broken, and the audience half-believes it already but hasn’t seen it written down with any precision.
Founders skip this because they think the world-claim is obvious. It rarely is, even to the founders who built the company. The investor sees fifteen decks a week and starts each one cold. The first three slides install the worldview that makes everything that follows feel like the logical conclusion of a premise they’ve already accepted.
Copy as evidence
Every word on the homepage either confirms the positioning or contradicts it. There’s no such thing as neutral copy and there should be no such thing as filler. A hero headline that says “Empower your team” contradicts the positioning of every company that uses it, because the words do no work and the customer has read the same line on a hundred other websites that week.
Specific words confirm positioning; vague words dissolve it. “We process two billion dollars a year in same-day payouts for marketplaces” is a positioning sentence. “We make payments easy” is a marketing hallucination that any company in the category could have written.
A good test: take your homepage copy, swap your company name for a competitor’s, and see if the sentences still make sense.
If they do, you’ve written wallpaper.
The same test applies to investor decks, sales scripts, hiring pages, and press releases. If a competitor could lift your copy verbatim and use it without changing anything, you’ve written nothing of your own.
The pricing tell
A consultancy charging $4,000 a month is in a different category from one charging $40,000 a month, regardless of what either website claims. A SaaS product priced at $19 a seat competes in a different market from one priced at $19,000 a year, even when the feature lists overlap. The price tells the customer which competitive set you’re in, and the customer believes the price more than they believe the copy.
Founders who underprice are doing it because they don’t trust their own positioning. They worry that customers will balk, so they hedge by setting a number nobody could object to. The result is that nobody treats them as serious peers, because cheap reads as low-stakes, and low-stakes products don’t get bought by buyers with real budget authority.
The correction is to price for the position you want, and let the positioning catch up to the number. If the plan is to sell to enterprise, an SMB price contradicts the plan on contact.
The number itself is a positioning claim, and underpricing is a way of telling the market you don’t believe what your own homepage says.
Hiring is downstream of narrative
People want to work for companies whose story they can repeat at a dinner party without sounding ridiculous. If your narrative is sharp, you can hire above your weight class. If it’s muddy, every hire becomes a war.
I’ve watched companies with worse products win senior hires from companies with better products, because the narrative was clearer and the candidates could picture themselves inside it. The folks who are actually in demand evaluate the story before the feature set. They want to know whether the story they’ll tell their next employer about this job will sound impressive or embarrassing. We’re all climbing the ladder. Your story has to place you one rung up.
The same logic applies to retention. The best people leave when they can no longer explain what the company is doing. They leave before the bad ones do, because the bad ones don’t have other options, and the good ones run the calculation every six months.
A clear positioning is a retention tool. It tells your best engineers why their work matters at the scale of the company, and it lets them say something coherent at parties when someone asks where they work.
When to reposition
Repositioning is the most dangerous play in the manual. Done well, it can rescue a stalled company in a quarter; done badly, it can torch ten years of accumulated meaning in a week.
A company should reposition when one of four things happens.
The market has moved underneath the original claim, and the position now describes a world that no longer exists.
The product has expanded into territory the original claim can’t cover, and customers are confused about what they’re actually buying.
A competitor has captured the language you used to own, and the contrast has stopped doing the work it used to do. Or,
the founders have learned something material about who their best customers are, and the original audience description has stopped matching the people writing the cheques.
Repositioning that happens because the founders are bored with their own message will always fail; personal boredom is not a strategic signal. The customer hasn’t heard the message yet. The customer is just starting to remember it. Throwing it out because the founders have repeated it a thousand times is throwing out the only thing the market has begun to recognise.
Most repositioning attempts try to rewrite everything, and most fail because the new version has no equity, no recognition, and no proof points. A surgical change at the wedge or the alternative is easier to absorb than a full rebrand of the category and audience.
Founders as narrators
Every founder is the chief narrator of the company, whether they want the role or not. Investors read founders; hires read founders; and customers read founders. The way the founders talk about the company in informal settings tells the market more than any campaign ever will.
The founders who win at this discipline share two habits.
They use the same vocabulary to describe the company across every audience, so the deck, the all-hands speech, the analyst briefing, and the dinner-table answer to a stranger all sound like they came from the same head.
They resist the temptation to update the story every time a journalist asks a clever question, because they understand that the question is a test of conviction, not an invitation to redesign the company in real time.
Founders who lose at this discipline tend to do the opposite. They tailor the story to whoever’s in the room. The deck says one thing, the all-hands says another, the analyst briefing says a third, and the dinner-table answer says a fourth. Over time the company loses the ability to say anything at all, because nobody inside it can agree on what the company is.
The fix is the spine again. Write it down, read it out loud, and use the words themselves. The discipline is to bore yourself with your own message a decade before the market starts repeating it back, and to keep saying the same true thing while competitors burn their oxygen on rebrands every eighteen months.
What to do this week
Skip the rebrand for now. Sit five people in a room and finish the sentence: “We are the _____ for _____ who want to _____ instead of _____.”
The blanks are the spine: category, audience, outcome, alternative.
If everyone in the room agrees on the completed sentence, the company has working positioning. If the sentence doesn’t read cleanly to everyone, no amount of homepage redesign or paid advertising will fix the underlying problem, because the underlying problem is that the company doesn’t know what it is.
Run the exercise this week. Don’t leave the room until the sentence reads cleanly. Then check it against the homepage, the deck, the sales script, and the latest job posting. Anything that contradicts the sentence is a leak in the spine. Patch the leaks one by one, and don’t open a new marketing channel until they’re closed.
The longer game
Positioning is a posture you hold for years, not a campaign you run for a quarter. Companies that hold a clear posture for a decade compound advantages that companies running a fresh campaign every quarter never accumulate.
Berkshire Hathaway’s annual letter has said the same things, with the same vocabulary, since the 1970s. Buy good businesses at fair prices, hold them forever, trust the underlying math, and ignore the short-term noise. The letter doesn’t change because the position doesn’t change. The position doesn’t change because Warren Buffett worked out what he believed early and refused to negotiate with the market about it.
You don’t have fifty years. At most, at the absolute stretch, you have 2-3 before the company either compounds into something or doesn’t.
Pick the claim, hold the claim, write everything else from the claim, and let competitors burn their oxygen on rebrands every eighteen months while you keep saying the same, damned, true ~thing.
Selfonomics is published by my lab, Studio Self.
We make tech legible.